Salon of Open Secrets

It is an open secret that hardware operating on our smart devices contains not only plastic, but also conflict materials such as tungsten, tin, tantulum and gold. Technology is therefore not neutral. These resources are mined in conflict regions, assembled to electric circuits under harmful labour conditions and mostly ending up in contaminating landfills. This pollution is best understood as an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land. Arts-based research methods seize artistic practice to unpack complexity. Through opening up our artistic research project to citizens we want to make this phenomenon tangible. Intersecting Art and Science needs to be an experience of empowerment, of encouragement to find new ways. This Citizen Science project tackles sensitive issues through a colourful 2D game that introduces the player to alternative technologies. Visitors of the Technisches Museum Wien (TMW) can become players and navigate through dierent scenes to meet specific characters as avatars. These avatars represent people from around the world, collaborators in our main research project. Through this form of interactive storytelling young people are invited to become inventors of green and fair hardware themselves, to network among each other and transform their ideas into actual prototypes in the next phase of the project. Through the term Ethical Hardware we want to describe technology that does not harm the environment, but embraces restorative practices for the benefit of nature and inhabitants alike. There are strong social movements among teenage, female* and non-binary creatives who share similar values (Extinction Rebellion, Fridays For Future). Our Citizen Science Project addresses the lack of communication between academia and the youth movement. We would like to explore the creativity and transformative work performed by young citizens, specifically from minorities, by oering a playful entry point to our research. We hope that the visions contributed by CSs will transform our theoretical definition of what imagining future technologies entails, and vice versa give participants the chance to discover alternative futures. This way together we hope to gain the necessary strengths to face this crisis. Our research team composed by artists researchers Stefanie Wuschitz and Patrcia J. Reis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna will interact with participants at Technisches Museum Wien (TMW), our national research partner and make the research results operative for use in classrooms and after school programs.

There is a treasure in your pocket, inside your smartphone and your laptop. It is an open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains not only plastics but also gold, silver and conflict minerals such as tungsten, tin and tantalum. Hence, your technology is not neutral. How you deal with e-waste matters. In this citizen science project, conducted by Patrcia J. Reis (PT/AT) and Stefanie Wuschitz (AT), we investigated alternative hardware from locally sourced materials, so-called ethical hardware, to develop and explore renewable practices for the benefit of both nature and humans. We worked with young people in schools, but also at a Maker Faire, a children's university and a museum of technology, to create prototypes of ethical hardware for the future. Sometimes the participants of the workshops, our citizen scientists, developed speculative concepts, and sometimes their ideas were realistic. We collected all of them and added a selection to our Ethical Hardware Kit, a backpack full of materials that meet our requirements and could - when assembled - become ethical hardware. There were conductive, non-conductive and organic materials, parts salvaged from old printers that we disassembled in the workshops, and elements that the citizen scientists made from chemical formulas. It helped that our citizen scientists had different backgrounds and came from a wide age range and different types of school. The younger the participants, the bolder and more innovative were their contributions. We tried to put the citizen scientists in touch with eight selected international experts and disseminate their ideas on an open hardware platform to start an inter-generational conversation about how to build technology without causing human rights violations and contaminating the environment. The outcome offered hope and encouraged deeper investigation, not only when it comes to biodegradable substances but also when finding allies and a shared agenda internationally. This project was affiliated with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Institute of Education in Arts, and took place in collaboration with Vienna Museum of Science and Technology.